James Poulos writes about political news, focusing on our choices for liberty and our options for reform. He's a columnist at The Daily Beast, the host of the Free Radicals podcast, and the frontman of a band called Black Hi-Lighter.

As envisioned by Mr. Sekoff and Ms. Huffington, the network won’t be CNN or YouTube or “The View,” but it will incorporate elements of all three. Mr. Sekoff described it as a “never-ending talk show.”

The ambitious plans come at a time when all manner of media organizations are trying to expand into live video, creating a new set of online competition to established television channels like CNN. The Wall Street Journal streams about four hours of live video each weekday on its Web site. The New York Times started its first daily business Webcast earlier this week.

Though so far AOL is emphasizing the substantial chunk of the Microsoft deal that will go to shareholders, there’s a broader sense in which AOL’s greatest value is in parting out its — let’s be frank — Microsoft-era technologies. Wringing out that money and reinvesting it in HuffPo’s media brand is the smartest move AOL can make. There’s no better way to steer AOL’s ship away from its dial-up, subscriber-based past, and no better way to increase access to audience. (Reality check: it took AOL 9 years to get to a million users — versus 9 months for Facebook, and 9 days for Draw Something.) Meanwhile, Team AOL can set itself to work building out the platforms HuffPo needs to conquer online media.

That’s already happening, in fact. Perhaps the biggest clue to the future of AOL and HuffPo is the app:

Tim O’Brien, a former editor for The New York Times who is now the executive editor of The Post, is in charge of a magazinelike app, now in the prototype stage, that would come out weekly and would contain highlights of the site. The app’s creation was first reported last month by Forbes.

His team’s access to AOL’s mobile app team in Palo Alto, Calif., Mr. O’Brien said, exemplifies the benefits of the year-old merger. “They’ve been an incredible resource to us, financially and intellectually,” he said.

Financially and intellectually — in that order — AOL can survive and thrive well into the video-driven future of online media by becoming what, in a sense, it always has been: an app. But instead of delivering mail, IMs, and news, it can deliver…HuffPo.

What remains is for HuffPo to deliver as a must-read news and commentary source on par not only with other online competitors but with the big TV media players. It’s a tall order — but it’s certainly not beyond reach. And, really, it’s difficult to imagine where else HuffPo has to go. There’s a reason Google(including YouTube), for instance, is rushing into online TV. Meanwhile, television viewers are cutting the cord — 1 million last year — in favor of Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, and other outlets.

A huge opportunity without any well-established business model? That’s a perfect fit for a HuffPo that can siphon off otherwise virtually inert value from AOL for years to come. Arianna’s well ahead of the game. All she needs to do now is find and deploy the kind of talent that will keep viewers across the political spectrum coming back.

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The Huffington Post has benefited from the liberal swing in politics, but can they address a larger market that consider themselves conservatives (the majority of American according to polls)? It appears there may be a backlash against the liberal media for bias, that includes HuffPo soon. Will being labeled bias hurt them in the long run?

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In my opinion, Microsoft got the best acquisition today. The patents can be used defensively for Facebook’s suit against Yahoo as well as defend their existing assets. Facebook’s acqui-hire of Instagram was a good augmentation to their existing photo sharing features, but without deeper integration, it is not as impactfull as it could be. However, AOL was the big winner, as they get a billion dollars of cash, the cash isn’t taxed, and they still get to use the patents after they sell them to Microsoft.